Create a TrueView for shopping campaign

TrueView for shopping campaigns make video ads interactive by connecting viewers directly to your products and providing information that brings customers closer to making a purchase.

These ads use your existing Merchant Center product data to generate shopping cards, and up to 6 shopping cards may appear on a video ad at a time. You can filter your inventory or select specific products to limit which products can show with your video ads.

In this article, we'll walk you through how to set up a TrueView for shopping campaign in Google Ads.

If you have specific products in mind from your Merchant Center account that you’d like to use in your campaign, select the Choose specific products option. You can then search for products by title, by item ID, or by the URL of the item in your online store that was uploaded to Merchant Center.

You can even select items that are out of stock, however they won’t show until they’re back in stock -- so there’s no need to adjust your campaign as products go in and out of stock.

When using the “Choose specific products” option, you can view more information about the products in your search results by clicking on “Details.” You’ll see details for your items, which are versions of the product in each country where it’s available. The “status” column shows if an item is ready to serve for each country.

Note: You may see a yellow icon next to the word “Details” for some products. This icon appears when a product is “Not approved” or “Out of stock” in any country where it’s available. If your campaign targets a specific country, it can run as long as there’s at least one item that’s “Ready to serve” in that country.

Here are the statuses that can appear:

Ready to serve: The item is approved and eligible to run on shopping cards on your video ad.

Not approved: The item is disapproved in your Merchant Center account. You can check the status in Merchant Center to understand why the item is disapproved. Automated systems identify items that violate our policies and the Products Feed Specification. If you use the item in your campaign anyway, we’ll request an additional manual review, which takes 1 to 3 business days. Note that an item can only be manually reviewed once.

Out of stock: The item is out of stock. You provide an item’s availability using the “availability” attribute in your product data. If the availability is set to “out of stock” for a country, the item won't serve in that country. You can still select it for your campaign, and it will start appearing when it becomes available again.

How to use "Create custom filters"

Before you begin

You'll need to have access to your product data in Merchant Center and be willing to add custom label attributes to your products.

Changes in the new Google Ads Experience

The new Google Ads experience simplifies the process of creating custom filters in TrueView for Shopping campaigns by removing multiple dimensions used for selecting products and replacing them with only one flexible dimension. The dimensions: Brand, Product Type, Google Ads Label and ads grouping are no longer available. They have been replaced with the more flexible Custom Labels. Note that these labels are different from Google Ads label dimensions accessible before.

Using the new Custom Filters in Google Ads will make the product filter uneditable in the previous AdWords experience.

Using custom labels

You can have up to five custom labels in your product data, numbered 0 through 4. Choose a custom label and assign a unique name to each of the products that you want to use together in a TrueView for Shopping campaign inside Google Merchant Center.

Once you've set up custom labels in your product data, you can use their values to select the products that you want your Google Ads campaign to use.

Example

If the products you want to advertise do not use ‘Custom label 2’ already, you can update them in Google Merchant Center and set their ‘Custom label 2’ attribute to the value you choose, e.g. ‘TrueViewProductList’.

You can then add the custom filter to your campaigns in the new Google Ads experience in the Product Filter panel during campaign creation or by going to Campaign > Settings.

Select the label you want to use (‘Custom label 2’) and set the value of this attribute (‘TrueViewProductList’).